Beauchamp gave up rowing.  As he rested on the sculls, his head was bent and turned toward the bank.  Renee perceived an over-swollen monster gourd that had strayed from a garden adjoining the river, and hung sliding heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in prolonged contemplation of its image in the mirror below.  Apparently this obese Narcissus enchained his attention.

She tapped her foot.  ‘Are you tired of rowing, monsieur?’

‘It was exactly here,’ said he, ’that you told me you expected your husband’s return.’

She glanced at the gourd, bit her lip, and, colouring, said, ’At what point of the river did I request you to congratulate me on it?’

She would not have said that, if she had known the thoughts at work within him.

He set the boat swaying from side to side, and at once the hugeous reflection of that conceivably self-enamoured bulk quavered and distended, and was shattered in a thousand dancing fragments, to re-unite and recompose its maudlin air of imaged satisfaction.

She began to have a vague idea that he was indulging grotesque fancies.

Very strangely, the ridiculous thing, in the shape of an over-stretched likeness, that she never would have seen had he indicated it directly, became transfused from his mind to hers by his abstract, half-amused observation of the great dancing gourd—­that capering antiquity, lumbering volatility, wandering, self-adored, gross bald Cupid, elatest of nondescripts!  Her senses imagined the impressions agitating Beauchamp’s, and exaggerated them beyond limit; and when he amazed her with a straight look into her eyes, and the words, ’Better let it be a youth—­and live, than fall back to that!’ she understood him immediately; and, together with her old fear of his impetuosity and downrightness, came the vivid recollection, like a bright finger pointing upon darkness, of what foul destiny, magnified by her present abhorrence of it, he would have saved her from in the days of Venice and Touraine, and unto what loathly example of the hideous grotesque she, in spite of her lover’s foresight on her behalf, had become allied.

Face to face as they sat, she had no defence for her scarlet cheeks; her eyes wavered.

‘We will land here; the cottagers shall row the boat up,’ she said.

‘Somewhere—­anywhere,’ said Beauchamp.  ’But I must speak.  I will tell you now.  I do not think you to blame—­barely; not in my sight; though no man living would have suffered as I should.  Probably some days more and you would have been lost.  You looked for me!  Trust your instinct now I’m with you as well as when I’m absent.  Have you courage? that ’s the question.  You have years to live.  Can you live them in this place—­with honour? and alive really?’

Renee’s eyes grew wide; she tried to frown, and her brows merely twitched; to speak, and she was inarticulate.  His madness, miraculous penetration, and the super-masculine charity in him, unknown to the world of young men in their treatment of women, excited, awed, and melted her.  He had seen the whole truth of her relations with M. d’Henriel!—­the wickedness of them in one light, the innocence in another; and without prompting a confession he forgave her.  Could she believe it?  This was love, and manly love.